The hatch top was open, laid back as before, and Chris, feeling some danger, changed to a mouse as he crouched on the top rung.
Hesitating, sniffing the fetid air of the hold, he finally ran down the ladder edge. There he sensed imminent death at its foot in time to leap as far as he could as he reached the last few rungs of the ladder. For Simon Gosler stood waiting at the bottom armed with a club, which he brought down with a splintering crash on the wooden crossbars as the mouse ran past and leapt out of sight. Curses instantly filled the hot air like so many wasps. Simon Gosler thrashed around with the club laying it about him on the floor, narrowly missing several times, and yelling at the top of his raucous lungs for companions to help him. In no time figures carrying flaming torches clattered down into the hold and Chris, his own shape regained, knew he would have to be quick as he had never been quick before.
With a flick the new knife was open in his hand and the blade pressed with all his strength against the hull of the Vulture. He was crowded into a corner as far as possible from the advancing row of torches and shouting men. Frantic rats, terrified by the flames of the torches and the reverberating noise, scampered over Chris's feet or ran up over his bending back and shoulders, but he did not move. The blade whirled in the stout wooden side of the Vulture, but it seemed no time before the flicker and wavering red of the nearest torches sent their flares over him from a distance. Chris could make out the silhouette of hunting figures as the first black trickle of sea water pierced through the side of the ship and stained the dry planks. Still the boy pushed the knife on a moment more until the water was a steady spurt, wetting his hand with its coolness. Then, as the torches sent their flames moving into the obscure corner where he had been, a fly soared up and out, over an empty metal plate and four dead rats, over the stooped screaming figure of a humpback, and a scattered line of searching men, out to the freshness of the night and the open sea.
Only Osterbridge Hawsey, curious at the torches and the shouting, looked out the cabin door in time to see a tiny boat scud past, back toward Tahiti. And only in his befuddled dreams did he puzzle over how the small craft could sail against the wind, or wonder how it could sail so well, when it seemed to be made of rope.
CHAPTER 28
hris and Amos lay belly down in a low clump of pine scrub at the top of a precipitous rocky pinnacle. Below them in the blistering noon lay the palace walls of the Lord of the Seven Seas, Descendant of the Sun and the Moon, Overlord of the Mountains and the Plains, Prince of all the Isles, Father of Plenty, and Brilliance-Before-Which-All-Cast-Down-Their-Eyes, the Emperor of China.